The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 268 No 7196 p624-625
4 May 2002

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Health Services Research and Pharmacy Practice summary

An evidence base for child doses

There are ethical difficulties in doing traditional kinetic and dose-ranging studies in children, and many hospital drugs are used outside their licence.

Professor James McElnay and colleagues from the Queen's University of Belfast and the pharmacy department at Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool are using blood samples taken for other reasons, for example laboratory tests, to build a paediatric drug profile database. Levels of the drug are measured using "micro-analytic" techniques, and a profile built using sparse data analysis. To date researchers have collected enough data to describe the paediatric kinetics of diclofenac and ranitidine.